


Overture

by FuwaFuwaMedb



Category: Fate/EXTRA, Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, non Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 13:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18591856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FuwaFuwaMedb/pseuds/FuwaFuwaMedb
Summary: Smoothing out the complications of time and the Babylonia singularity comes with unintentional consequences, since there was no Queen of Uruk during his time.





	Overture

Once again he was staring at the ceiling, counting the creases in the canopy as he heard the crying going off in the distance. He could hear the servants running in the direction of the screams, the footsteps doing nothing to calm his racing heart.  
  
His hands pressed to the bed next to him. His eyes closing as the wails kicked up a notch.

“Mother.”

The sound of a figure in a nearby chair made him turn his gaze, noting the woman’s dark signs of fatigue. Gone was the carefully fluffed and curled hair. Gone was the flawless complexion. He knew that look so well, finding it mirrored when he saw his own reflection.

They were exhausted.

“I will go to them,” the woman murmured.

“Rest, Ninsun.” The king replied, slowly climbing to his feet and pressing his lips to the woman’s forehead. “I know that I did not fall asleep in this bed last night.” He knew for a fact that it had not even been the previous evening that he had been brought here. Maybe an hour or so ago instead.

“I may steal your bed,” Ninsun replied, forcing herself to her feet. “Inform the mongrel guards to awaken me at dawn. I need to see to the children.”

Again, she pushed herself to limits beyond reasonable. He understood her keen interest, her desire to help. Yet it was too much.

“They will be fine, mother. Allow them to rest for a spell. I will see to it they sleep for a few hours for us to have peace.”

“We must not do anything against their natural instincts,” Ninsun argued, swaying in her great fatigue. “They need to be able to experience the depths of their needs and desires until they are old enough to learn to know better.”

“Shhh, mother,” he bid again. “I will see they sleep. I’m sure they are simply hungering.”

The woman leaned against him as he held her shoulders, shaking her head. “Bring them here. I will hold my grandchildren. I want them close to me since they cannot be with their mother.”

This again.

It had been months.

Somehow, someway, they had escaped the singularity, returning to time passing as it should. The Chaldeans had all vanished and, with them, the mother of the small bundles currently awakening all of Uruk. Rather than being able to see her children grow, their mother had been stolen away by space and time, unable to ever see them grow up.

Or so Ninsun had found, coming to the ziggurat and wrapping herself around both her grandchildren, face ruined from the tears she had shed so strongly. Her beautiful figure and presence had been extinguished, leaving the hallowed shell of what the goddess had once been. She refused to fully rest, distrusting fate and time to show her anything more.

Should the children have a future of pain, she wished not to know.

Should the children encounter their mother in a far off future, she wished not to know.

Truly, the great Ninsun had been done in by her own desires.

“Rest,” the mage king bid his mother again, pushing her into the bed and pulling the blankets over her. “For once, my arrogant excuse of a mother, lay your head down and bid me favor with your slumber. Ur and Nungal need their father right now. I will see to them.”

Stubbornly, her grip tightened on one of his arms.

“Please… Please bring them to me.”

He truly should make them adjust to their room. One room away was close enough to him. Yet he could already see the tears forming again.

“I will bring them when they have quietened,” Caster murmured.

She released him. Finally. Her body lay on its side, waiting as she nodded. And with that nod, he turned, traveling the great distance to hell itself in the form of the golden room. His attention went to the bed, with its raised sides and menagerie of blankets and cushions. The guards surrounding the thing, cooing and murmuring to the children dispersed at his presence, bowing and leaving him so he could look at the two children.

What hurt the most, in his humble opinion, was their appearance.

The two children were still young, only a few months old. Their meager presences were nothing less than the divine presence that one would expect of a young prince and princess. Both possessed the same golden hair that seemed spun of the sun’s rays like himself and his mother. Both possessed the same crimson gaze that charmed and bewitched citizens and gods alike. The two infants were absolutely perfect.

And in their perfection, he felt his blood chill.

They lacked everything from their mother. The brown hair he had spread across his bed. The deep brown eyes that had defied him time and time again. They did not even possess her capability of listening, unless their needs had been met.

Two tiny, perfect replicas of himself lay in the bed.

Two, tiny, perfect children of a demi-god.

“You weep too loudly,” he complained to them, looming over the two bodies as they squirmed and wailed. “Your grandmother mourns for your mother and you simply beg for another meal. How am I to raise you if you cannot understand loss when it comes to you?”

The two continued to wail.

“SILENCE!”

They stopped.

And now he was losing his temper.

Truly, he was in the depths of his mourning. The courtesans and women that he had busied himself with were doing nothing to temper his moods.

He leaned over the babies now, running a hand up both their bellies so he could rub their cheeks softly. His eyes drifted between the two.

“I did not want children alone,” he told them quietly. “I wanted someone here to raise them. You were supposed to suckle on your mother and drive me insane with want for my woman. Instead I find you destroying the sanctity of my home and destroying my mother’s heart.”

He had done the latter, but the two babies stared at him, eyes rimmed with unshed tears.

True children.

He lifted Ur first, noting the girl’s little hands already reaching for him. Ever like her mother, trying to grasp him as she was lifted. With her against his chest, he reached next for Nungal. The boy he had wanted the entirety of his life pressed those little hands to his chest as well, eyes closing the moment that he leaned against him.

They both went quiet, their little blond heads resting against his chest.

“At least you understand the value of silence in my presence,” he murmured, turning and heading back to his chambers. The two children made it difficult to open the door, making him motion for his guards for let him in.

His mother sat up, reaching and accepting Ur from him.

“My pretty baby,” she purred, pressing her lips to small bundle. “It makes my heart weep too. Cling to me and we will make it through another night.”

“They need to learn to sleep alone,” Caster told his mother, moving to lay on the other side of the bed.

“My Ur-Nungal need me,” she replied, yawning softly. “Only another woman in this small family can come close to closing the hole that has been created by time. I would destroy the peace again if it would bring her back to us, but I fear it would be before she joins those Chaldeans.”

It would.

His mother moved to the children’s room the following day, leaving him to his lonesome again. Her alterations to the room made room for them to rest at her side, their bodies clinging to her for the comfort.

And he watched.

The golden hair grew in length, knowledge building in those eyes. Defiance. Arrogance. Bliss. The world of emotions and thoughts bloomed forth as they shot up from their small, pudgy bodies. He could see them as they ran across the palace hallways, scaring off the women that came to sate his needs.

He abandoned his needs, delving like his mother into their youth.

His arms wrapped around the young boy that chased his shadow. His lips pressed to the forehead of the young girl that danced around his lions, laughing at their growls and small nips in her direction.

His mother loomed over them, holding them close when they saw other women with their children. Her whispers of their mother never reaching his ears to his great relief.

And still he found himself pausing, staring at the two as both toddlers ran and laughed through his palace.

It was not his face they held as the baby fat waned.

Though their eyes blazed like his own and their hair shone like the rays of the sun in the sky and on the palace of Uruk, their faces were that of the moon girl. His Hakuno looked back at him with those eyes and that hair.

He held them close the night he truly first saw it, weeping into their shoulders as the two struggled to understand what was happening.

His mother left him to weep, beckoning the guards to go elsewhere.

The meetings he went to ended early at the signs of the children, his feet carrying him from the ambassadors and diplomats to where his son and daughter played with cubs and sticks. He spoiled them, wrapping his arms around them tight at times so he could hold his woman.

Part of her was still here.

“Abum.”

Caster looked up one evening, noting Ur’s shifting in the doorway of his desk chambers. “Amelserru,” Child, he greeted in their native tongue of Sumerian. “You should be asleep.”

“Abum,” she says again. Father, she says. “I had a nightmare.”

Dreams and their darker ilk had never been something he had been fond of. Gilgamesh sighed, beckoning the small child to him and wrapping her in his arms. His work is once more abandoned. One of the advisors could handle its completion tomorrow.

“Abum, I had a bad dream about…”

Hesitation.

That has come to mean foul news in his time with the two children. They only hesitated when creating trouble or fearing trouble. The two had done the same when giving Ninsun’s prized steer to one of the lions. They had done the same when knocking over tapestries in the armory, creating a mess the guards had been yelled at for creating.

“What did you dream about, my amelserru?” Caster purred, pressing his lips to those cheeks. She was so much like her mother. Sparing his emotions like this. He wanted to hold the two children in his arms like this and stop the hands of time, keeping them until he could find a way to-

“Ummum,” she whispered.

Mother.

Caster pulled back, looking down at her as the girl stared at her hands on his vest. “I had a bad dream that we found Ummum but she was hurt.”

“Ummum is gone, Ur. She sits amongst warriors in a place far beyond our reach.”

“…I know.”

“She will not be able to see us nor us her.”

The girl closed her eyes, nodding. “I know, Abum. It makes me sad.”

“She is heathy and well, Ur. There is no need to be sad.”

The little girl looked up at him though, pressing against him more. “What if she doesn’t love us anymore? Why did she have to leave?”

Foolish.

Such foolish questions.

Yet he could feel his chest aching again. His arms wrapped around the senselessly foolish brat in his arms, holding her tightly to himself. His lips pressed against her shoulder. His face buried itself against that golden hair he had taken so long to accept.  
“Your Ummum,” he breathed through the thickness in his throat, “loved you more than anyone else in this universe. She loved you more than the air she breathed and the world around us. She gave everything for you and Nungal. She fought countless battles to reach the chance to bring you into this life and into our world.”

He pulled back as those red eyes looked up at him curiously. His forehead pressed lightly to hers, as he would his queen.  
“The moment that the two of you were born, your mother would not stop crying. She held you both in her arms and turned to me, staring me in the eyes and telling me that there was no beauty equal to you both. She smiled the same smile that comes to you and your brother’s lips and told me that I had been surpassed and that the entire palace needed more guards, to keep the gods and goddesses of our world from sweeping you into their arms.”

Ur nodded, wiping at her nose and eyes a little. “Ummum really loved us?”

“She weeps for every second that she is away from you and longs for the day you can be together again.”

“But we cannot reach her.”

“Only the most powerful of kings and queens and gods and warriors can reach her,” he told the girl. “One day, should you and your brother achieve it, you could find her.”

He would, even if it was only in Archer form.

The child curled up in his arms, settling in as he held her for a long time, her quiet sobs dripped down his chest, leaving him to return to his work as he stroked her back gently. His mother wandered in, Nungal in her arms as she sighed in relief.

“I had thought she had decided to sleep amongst the dangerous beasts again.”

“She expressed concern over her mother,” Caster replied quietly, noting the children both being asleep in their arms.  
“What did you tell her?”

“The truth.”

“Not the complete one, I suspect.”

“I cannot tell them such things. I have no desire for them to disrespect their gods in the same way that I have done. They should be able to respect what you have done for them and understand that there are beings that are of decent merit.” The Egyptian pharaoh god had been helpful in saving these lands, as had the Celtic half god who had wandered in with his lance at his side.

“I see…” His mother smiled softly, leaning her head against his son.

“This is the first I have seen you smile in a long while, woman. What thoughts have come to you?”

“Nothing more than a vision. The first in a very long time. It would seem Enlil the god of fate has decided to bless me with just one more.”

One more?

His hands set down the work, eyes focused on her now.

“What did you see?”

“Something that brings ease to this fatigued goddess.” Ninsun kissed his son’s cheek, those red eyes looking over at him mischievously. “I saw my dreams realized. Simply a bit late.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is all you receive,” she told him, turning around and cooing to the boy awakening in her arms. “Bring Ur to bed. You work too often. Do not allow my child’s children to suffer without a father.”

“Mother! What did you see!”

“Shhh, can he not see you sleep, my sweet Nungal? He is a brute. Become like your sweet mother. Defy everyone and stare us all down. Bid the world to bow at your feet and become the greatest of kings with your sister at your side.”

“Okay, Ama,” Nungal replied sleepily. Okay, grandmother.

“MOTHER!”

“Abum,” Ur whined, tugging at his vest. “You’re noisy.”

Pestilence.

“Forgive me, Ur. Your Ama drives me mad.”


End file.
